iPad – $0.02
31 01 2010So two thoughts about iPad:
- I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
- The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.
In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.
*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”
Just a few comments:
I disagree on two points with Flash. Firstly, the old “the customer is always right” saw. The customer is not always right, the costumer is in fact often an idiot who will enter his banking information on a phishing site, download spyware and viruses that promise a longer penis, and then blame *anyone but himself* for the outcome. This same user will gladly load all available flash content and then complain when they get shitty battery life (well, of course right now they complain they can’t get flash in the first place, so you could argue that really doesn’t change anything). There are myriad reasons not to include flash, and very few reasons to do so, and *increasingly fewer* (and this is actually the second point I think that goes most in Apple’s favor): more and more websites are moving away from flash and to HTML5/JS for video delivery and interactive content. If you think the iPhone and iPad play no role in this, I’d probably disagree with you. Apple’s decision, however autocratic, to categorically disable Flash on their touch devices is *making the web a better place* – not just for the iPad, but for everyone. Will there be growing pains? Sure. But Apple has never been afraid to move away from technologies long before they were well and truly dead (like floppies), always to the derision or dismay of certain users, and, thus far, mostly vindicated.
The iPhone and iPad not having flash will, one day, look just like the iMac dumping floppies. I’d bet on that.
As to the comparison of an iPad vs. MacBook, I really think it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison (even if, technically, they’re both Apples). It’s like comparing a toaster to an oven. While the oven is far more capable and powerful, and you *could* make toast in the oven, who does that? Granted, a toaster is not for everyone, either, and I’m certainly not saying that the iPad would be the right choice for you. You are a man of very… particular tastes.
Heck, I’m not sure the iPad is right for me, but I would be surprised if people like my Mom don’t end up with one. But hey, I said the same about the iPhone and then ended up getting one on launch day after playing around with it. Interfaces matter more than features, I’ll gladly take a device with less features that does those few features really insanely well than one that does everything under the sun but makes me jump through hoops to figure out how to do the simplest things. It’s why I ended up moving away from Linux – I spend enough time each day trying to manipulate computers into doing what I want that, in my free time, I want stuff to Just Work(tm). I want to spend less time fiddling with the computer and more time with *the stuff I need a computer to do*. I can’t imagine replacing my Mac with an iPad, but I could imagine in the not-too-distant future spending more time on an iPad than on my Mac, and only going to the Mac for serious software development.
But time will tell. Right now I’m too poor to afford an iPad, so it’s really all academic anyway.
The iPad’s War on Flash May Be Over Before it Begins – Newsweek
I expect multitasking to be added at some point, but really, I don’t miss it on my iPhone, and I don’t expect I’ll miss it on the iPad. Multitasking is not a feature in and of itself. What is the use case you actually want to support? Something like “listening to Pandora while playing a game” is a use case, and one I can sympathize with (though I’m pretty content listening to my own music library), something like “chat with my friends on GChat while I surf the web” is a use case (one that’s extremely clunky with the current push-notification system), but “I want to run apps at the same time because I can” is not really, in and of itself, useful. Apps on my iPhone generally start fast enough that the start-up time is about on the level of my brain’s context-switching latency anyway. I’d be surprised if it’s slower on the iPad.
Also, I’m a terrible garbage collector, I end up with about a billion tabs and apps open over time on my Mac, and then I need to go around cleaning up. I don’t really mind not having to do that on the iPhone, or have to use a process manager. Maybe it’ll be annoying on the iPad, guess we’ll see. Either way, I suspect some kind of support for these scenarios to emerge. If not true third-party multitasking (and this remains one of my prime suspects for iPhone OS 4.0), then some sort of built in chat/communication, or some other support for the scenarios where multitasking actually matters.
As suspected, the new version of the iPhone OS (coming to the iPhone in the summer, iPad in the fall) has multitasking. And I won’t go on about Flash (even though my previous comments on it seem to have disappeared into the ether).